Yep, the child abuser has already announced she is considering an appeal.

Munchausen by Proxy is a very interesting syndrome. Wikipedia tells us that close to 10% of children subjected to this die from the abuse. Over 90% of the offenders/sufferers are mothers or other women in caregiving roles towards their child victims. Yeah, aren’t men the abusive ones? However, it’s a very rare syndrome.

No physical diagnostic marker or cause of Munchausen by Proxy has been discovered but a small correlation has been reported between it and reduced right-cortical blood flow. Abuse and/or emotional neglect in childhood is assumed to be one cause and there have been cases consistent with that, but it is also believed that some people have simply learned to seek attention and concern through their children’s illnesses that they start to manufacture, the more serious and mysterious the better.

As was the case for the woman in this posting, most offenders strongly and consistently deny their crimes even in the face of irrefutable evidence such as having been caught administering poison during a visit to the victim’s hospital bed. No doubt though there will be wrongful convictions of people whose children simply had complex and recurring health conditions.

The sydrome does not amount to an insanity defence which requires the mental illness to be so debilitating that the offender was not capable of recognizing the offending as morally wrong. Most murderers and even most people who react violently during marital separation are suffering from temporary mental illness that is not severe enough to proffer an insanity plea.

The present woman was treated much better than any man could expect, from the judge’s praise of her generally as a mother to a 30% reduction from the sentence ‘starting point’ because of the syndrome. No minimum period before parole was specified so she could be out in little more than two years. No addition to the sentence was made for her continued total denial of the offending. How often do we see any man receive a 30% reduction for violence committed under the temporary insanity caused by separation and threat to his relationship with his children?

Ministry of Men’s Affairs blinded by sexism again. Yep, in the bottom line there was some perception of inequality.

The behaviour is a describable syndrome. The sharp end of a range of behaviours that come to an intersection of authority where the medical professional, criminal prosecutor, and legal system have to cooperate and understand each other.

If a mother, in another example, burnt new clothes given by the father, and dressed her children in old second hand clothing, to create a set of circumstances that had a desired effect, and provided the desired outcome, it would not meet the same threshold of intervention but nethertheless is still part of a woe-is-me range of behaviours exhibited by sick women.

In an extention of sympathy seeking behaviour where a woman might live with the expectation of receiving such treatment from a parent, then later in life a partner, father of her children, friends, but in the absence of any of the above, because of the extent of their behaviour their last resort is to use their children, most probably because they have worn their welcome out on any other doorstep and cannot manage behind their own.

This is what fathers face daily in the Family Court, where they are held responsible and punished for the failings of the woman, and in a similar way, in the text of the linked post we see a lawyer looking to excuse the ‘offenders’ behaviour in the absence of any one else to blame.

What on earth is that about? Where is a single example of Ministry of Men’s Affairs having been ‘blinded by sexism’ before? And in what way did our reply #2 suggest we were blinded by sexism? This is ridiculous.

If you have an opinion about another post, and want to apply a comment to it, the sensible approach would be to comment under that post.

Here is a link should you have trouble finding the rape post you have referred to.

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